The Young, A Mysterious Young Band

The internet makes it easy to find new bands...maybe too easy. It’s hard to feel the thrill of discovery and connection with a new band when you can come across 50 new bands a day — and when every jackass at your school or work can just as easily do the same thing. So what’s a new band to do if it wants to maintain mystery and forge a connection with in-the-know fans? They can start by coming up with an un-Google-able name such as Health, Cults, or Yacht.

That may be what’s going on with the Young, a young (naturally) band from Texas with a name that sounds as if it got cut off somewhere between adjective and noun. Formed almost seven years ago, the Young started out with loud, fast, post-hardcore punk and started tweaking their sound over the next few years, as evidenced on a handful of 7-inch vinyl singles on obscure labels and a track on a compilation. By the time the Young released the powerful Voyagers of Legend in 2010, the guitars were twisted out of shape by effects, and vocalist Hans Zimmerman was half buried in the mix. He was still shouting like a punk, and the guitars and drums raged like hardcore, but the atmosphere was downright eerie. It was like a cross between shoegazing and stage diving.

If you work through the obfuscation, you’ll be rewarded with melody and hooks. There are other mysterious young bands working a somewhat similar vein these days — most notably the Young’s fellow Texans, Woven Bones — but the Young seem headed for greater things. We’ll see with their next release on Matador Records later this year.